What I Carried In The Original Messenger Bag

Sometimes I wish I'd saved the bag I used when I was pedaling the canyons of Manhattan to deliver legal documents, fabric samples, slices of pizza (!),manuscripts--and a few envelopes and packages with their own unwritten "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policies attached, if you know what I mean.

That was a strange time in my life. I had a college degree. I'd lived and worked in Paris.  But I had absolutely no idea of what I wanted to do next.  Actually, I didn't want to know:  I knew that I could be turned into a writer and/or an educator, in some fashion or another, but I was too angry to want those things, or much of anything else. And I was stupid enough to think that sort of anger made me superior to-- or, at least, more sensitive or wounded than-- other people.

I told family members and my few friends (actually, by that time, one friend) that I wasn't ready to commit to a profession, or to even work in an office.  The truth was that I couldn't have done those things, to please them or anyone else.  And there simply wasn't anything else motivating me to do those things--or much of anything else, quite frankly.


A grandmother and an uncle who were very close to me had recently died.  And a friend had committed suicide. Of course, I had other demons and ghosts as well.  I didn't think anyone else could understand them; in truth, they didn't even make sense to me.  So,  I didn't want to talk, much less answer, to anyone unless I absolutely had to. 


So what else could I have been, at that time in my life, but a messenger?  


Remember that in those days--circa 1983--there was absolutely no status in being a messenger.  It wasn't a job that hipsters (or their equivalents in those days) did.  And only the really hard-core cyclists rode fixed-gear bikes; they weren't the status symbols of those who were trying to show, or make themselves or their friends believe, they weren't bourgeois.  


At that time, messenger bags weren't fashionable accessories.  


So, when I stopped messengering (Surely some English teacher told you "Gerunding nouns is wrong."  I didn't listen. It just figures that I teach English now.),  I sold my bag without thinking about it.  I'd just begun to work for American Youth Hostels, when it was located on Spring Street and the neighborhood still had some halfway interesting art and sandwich shops with names like "Rocco and His Brothers." One guy, named Judah, used to hang out there when he wasn't making his rounds on his old  Peugeot.  He had been a messenger, it seemed, since before the rest of us were born.  I used to see him on the streets when I was dodging cabs and pedestrians for my commissions.  So, at one time or another, did every other messenger in Manhattan.  


He told me that a friend of his was going follow him into the business I'd just left and therefore needed a messenger bag.  I'd used mine for about a year. Smog, slush, rain, pizza drippings, spilled drinks-- and a couple of burns from cigarettes that weren't made by companies that contributed to the campaigns of Southern politicians-- left their almost-still-viscous mosaic on the once-bright green canvas. Still, the bag was as strong as it was the day I bought it.  So, Judah's courier- novitiate friend paid me not much less than I paid for the bag.


When I bought it new, it was just like the bag in this photo--except, of course, that mine was green:

It was made--to my order--by a small company called Globe Canvas, which was located in the basement of some building in Chinatown, if I remember correctly.   The guy who, it seemed, was Globe Canvas asked which messenger service I was working for.  From my answer, he knew which size and color bag to make.  He was an older Italian gentleman and seemed like one of those forces of nature that always did, and always would be doing, whatever you saw him doing.  I hear that he died a couple of years ago.  I'm not surprised, as he was far from being a young man even then.


Anyway, these days, it seems that every other company that makes a messenger bag--or, more precisely, a bag that reflects the self-conscious aspirations to hipness of its owner as much as the style of the bag I carried for a year--says that theirs is the "original."  


I say that if any bag was the original, nobody would--or could--buy it.  Only the down-and-out, reject-of-society messenger of yore could ever have had such a thing.  And he wouldn't be bragging about it.


It was a great bag, though.  Almost nothing you can buy today is as well-made.  I'd love to have it now, even if I haven't used a messenger bag since the day I made my last delivery.
 

Missing A Ride

Today I had planned to go for a ride with my cousin.  Back in January, I went bike shopping with him.   He ended up with a Bianchi hybrid, on which he swapped the stock saddle for a wider one.  He's a bit older than I am, and hadn't ridden for decades before he bought his mount. I am happy that he bought a bike that he'll actually ride; I won't try to nudge him toward a more "serious" bike.


This would have been the first time we rode together.  However, I had to cancel:  My eye infection is still healing, and I don't want to take any chances.  Plus, having this infection has left me very tired.  I remember reading somewhere that a significant portion of our body's energy goes toward making our eyes function.  It makes sense:  When our eyes are tired, we are tired.  


It's just my luck that today has been just about everybody's idea of a perfect fall day.  It's been pleasantly cool and crisp, and the sun has shone brightly.  It's a welcome change from the driving rain we had for a couple of days, and the two days of 40mph-plus wind gusts that followed.  It's exactly the sort of day when I want to get on my bike, period.  


I wonder whether doctors are being sarcastic when they refer to people like me as "patients."

When You Have A Couple Hundred To Blow

You can't make this stuff up.

Believe it or not, at least two companies are actually making carbon fiber racks that clamp on seat posts.  They both look something like what you see in the photo.


Bontrager and Topeak both claim that their versions of the carbon-fiber seat post rack can support seven kilograms.  That's reasonable enough, I guess:  If I had a seatpost-mounted rack, I don't think I'd want to put much more weight on it.  And, if I were going to carry panniers and camping equipment, I don't think I'd be using any seatpost-mounted rack, whatever its material.


Then again, I don't think I'd be using anything made of carbon fiber if I were carrying much more than a spare tube and a multitool on my bike.  Actually, I don't have, and don't plan to install,  anything carbon fiber on any of my bikes.   Whatever weight savings those feathery tidbits might offer would be negated by the weight my body is storing, as bodies are wont to do when they reach my age.  And the carbon-fiber weight savings would certainly be nullified by, say, saddle or pannier bags, let alone what anyone might put in them.


And although failure is relatiively rare in high-quality bike parts and accessories, I wouldn't want to take the chance of breaking any carbon-fiber part or accessory. Carbon-fiber tubes are particularly nasty when they fail:  They break along a jagged edge, like a glass bottle.  And carbon-fiber edges are as sharp as those bottle fragments.  If a carbon fiber seatpost were to fail, having an uncomfortable saddle would be the least of my worries.  All that beautiful work Dr. Bowers did would certainly be for naught!


Of course, a broken rack wouldn't have the same consequences.  But things could get ugly once that broken rack and its contents fall into the rear wheel.  And if that wheel is made of carbon...


Maybe I'm just getting old and cranky, but I still think that fiber belongs in cereal and carbon in filters.   

A Mixted-Up Free Spirit

This bike was parked on West 14th Street, near Sixth Avenue, in Manhattan:

It's a rather odd mishmash of bike design.  On one hand, it's a traditional American women's frame with a swooped-down top tube.  Another aspect of traditional American desgn is the mini-stay connecting the top tube with the down tube, which is also curvy in the manner of traditional American women's frames.

What I found interesting, though, is the top tube consists of twin parallel tubes, not unlike what we see on French-style mixte frames.  And those tubes are welded together, as they were on lower-priced American bikes of the time, rather than lugged and brazed or filet-brazed.  

This bike also has an Ashtabula (one-piece) crank, which was also typical of lower-priced American bikes of the time.  

The bike is a Free Spirit, which was a line of bikes sold by Sears during the 1970's and early 1980's.  Most of those bikes, as you might imagine, weren't the sort of things bought by high-mileage cyclists or entusiasts.  Most of them, like the one in the photo, were made by one of the lower-end American manufacturers like Murray or Huffy, although there were a couple of "lightweight" models--including one with Reynolds 531 straight-gauge tubing in the main triangle--made in Austria by Steyr-Puch, the same company that made Puchs and Austro-Daimlers.  Later Free Spirit bikes were made in Taiwan, before bikes from that country gained respect from dedicated cyclists.

They, and other sporting goods sold by Sears, were endorsed by none other than Ted Williams.  He was a great player, but somehow I don't think of him as a free spirit.  (I never saw him play, as he was a bit before my time.  However, he has my respect because, in his Hall of Fame induction speech, he advocated for the induction of Negro League players, none of whom were enshrined in the Hall at that time.)  

I'm sorry I couldn't take a better photo.  I was squirreling in between the few inches (I ain't as skinny as I used to be!)  between the bike and the scaffold for a building that's under removation.  So I couldn't get into a much better position to take a photo.  Also, I used my cell phone, as I didn't have my camera with me.  I  had gone to my doctor, who monitored the healing of the conjunctivitis I came down with, and I wasn't riding or thinking much about photography.  

The bike looks as if it was ridden once or twice after it was purchased, then it was holed up in a garage or basement before its current owner found it in a thrift shop or garage sale.  Although it's a bike I wouldn't buy for myself, I'm glad it's getting use,  And, even though I never liked the paint jobs on this or any other Free Spirit, I think this one is kinda cute, if in a tongue-in-cheek sort of way, with that basket on the front.

Beryl Burton and Lana Lawless

I am going to mention Lana Lawless and Beryl Burton in the same post. Why?, you ask.


Well, I just happened to read about both of them today.  All right, you say, but what else do they have in common?


Not much, I'll admit.  But Beryl Berton is relevant to a question brought up by what Lana Lawless has done.


Ms. Lawless has made the news during the last couple of days because she's suing the Ladies Professional Golf Association because they won't let her play in their tournaments.  Why is that?


The LPGA is excluding her for the same reason they would probably exclude me, even if I met the organization's other requirements.  Yes, Ms. Lawless (Don't you just love the name?) is transgendered.  She had her sexual reassignment surgery in 2005.  


The LPGA, and much of general public--even some who are fully willing to accept that Ms. Lawless is as much of a woman as Lisa Ann Horst--argue that Lawless and other transgender women have advantages conferred upon them as a result of their XY chromosomes.  Although I don't have any statistics handy, I'd bet that, on average, we are taller and heavier than most women born with XX chromosomes.  Also, we have broader and denser bone structures (which is the reason why, even after years of taking estrogen, which weakens bones, osteoporosis is all but unknown in male-to-female transgenders) and, usually, more muscle mass. 


Now, it's easy to see how such differences would confer advantages on us (well, not me, given  my age and the shape I'm in!) in sports like American football--or in basketball, where height makes right.  But even in the latter sport, mens' (or trans-women's ) advantage isn't as great as one might think, since basketball players of both genders are in the top percentile for height.  (I mean, really, how much advantage does someone who's seven feet tall have over someone who's six-foot-nine?)  And, while I admit I don't know much about golf, as I've neither played the game nor followed the sport, I still have to wonder just how much of  an advantage one gender really has over an other.  Some argue that someone with XY chromosomes can make longer shots, but somehow I suspect there's more to winning a golf tournament than that.  Otherwise, why would there be so much of an audience for it, and why would even social golfers spend so much time practicing.


My point is, it's commonly assumed that if a woman with XY chromosomes were to enter a women's competition, she would dominate it and eliminate the women's competition's/league's/race's raison d'etre--or, at least, eliminate its audience and sponsorship.


That brings me to Beryl Burton.  She dominated British women's cycling at a time when it was coming to its own.  In fact, she was arguably as well-known as the male racers of her time.


That's because, at one point, she held the 12-hour time trial record.  Not the women's record, mind you--the record.  Moreover, she held that record for two years (1967-69), and at 277.25 miles,  she had an advantage of five miles over the men's record.  


Think about it:  She was riding faster, over a distance, than most of the male professional cyclists of her time.  And her record still stands as the women's record; only a handful of men have beaten it--even though she was riding in the days before disc wheels, carbon frames and skinsuits.


You might argue that she is an exception.  She is certainly unusual, but she's not the only female athlete to have held  a record for both men and women. Such a thing is relatively common in swimming and a few other non-contact sports.  As an example, when Gertrude Ederle set the record for swimming across the English Channel, her time was a full two hours faster than the previous record, which had been set by a man.


So, the examples I've set out beg this question:  How much of men's dominance of sports is really due to men's actual or alleged superior athleticism?  Could it be that men's dominance in sports other than American football, basketball, or a few others, is really due to the facts that they've been playing longer and that there is more of an infrastructure, if you will, of sports for boys than there is for girls?  Even after nearly four decades of Title IX, it's a lot easier to find a team, league or program for boys than it is to find their counterparts for girls, particlarly in smaller and rural communities.  


And what does that portend for the future of transgenders in sport?